We were in New York City for a handful of days in January this year and tried some great food. Here’s our favorites!

To know: We’re vegetarian. The regular kind. No meat but yes please to dairy and eggs.

Bare Burger

BareBurger was great! It’s a burger chain. Super cute restaurant if you want to sit in and eat. We took ours to our hotel room because it was super close and pretty much scarfed everything down so fast that I barely got a picture.

They had a bunch of choices for burgers from patties (meaty meaty ones if you prefer!) to sauces. We also got fries, onion rings, brussel sprouts, and a bunch of dips. There were also milkshakes but they didn’t make it into a picture.

Mökbar

Find it. Eat it. Do it. It’s in Chelsea Market and crazy busy and loud but it’s so worth it!

Phong is always on the hunt for noodles and was really pleased with these ones.

Dumplings! I am such a sucker for dumplings. I could eat them all day long. I have before.

And while Phong was after the noodles, I was after these. Disco fries. DISCO FRIES. French fries in a RAMEN GRAVY with kimchi on top! This was the first time I ate fries with chopsticks and have realized that if you don’t need to eat your fries with chopsticks, your fries are missing something–ramen gravy and kimchi. This was one of my favorite eats on the whole trip.

The Cinnamon Snail

All vegan! I know, I was skeptical too, but while vegetarian isn’t always vegan, vegan is always vegetarian, and we love a restaurant with more than one thing we can order!

There were also doughnuts in this mix, to be found in the previous blog post…

My burger had jalapeno macaroni and cheese on it! And no, I have no idea what it was since it obviously couldn’t be actual cheese (vegan), but I don’t ask how the wizard does his magic. I just eat it.

Phong’s burger was called a Sage burger and, I’ll admit, it was better than mine. Though I love the idea of jalapeno macaroni and cheese, it was the kind of hot that stains your mouth and makes other flavors impossible to taste.

Don’t get me wrong though, I ate the whole thing happily, but I also stole a couple bites of Phong’s.

More posts to come! Likely food related. Why is that all I take pictures of? I have more pictures of cake than I do of my own face. But let’s be honest, would you rather see 10 cakes or 10 pictures of my face? It’s cake right? I don’t blame you, I pick cakes too. <3

And lastly was Cinnamon Snail. All vegan but amazing! That raspberry chocolate beast there was mine and it was epic! Obviously, the toasted coconut one is Phong’s and the almond we ended up with because of a misunderstanding. All doughnut misunderstandings that result in MORE doughnuts are 100% okay.

That’s Phong eating the shit out of my doughnut. Look how angry he looks! It’s so good it makes you angry. Who knew a vegan place would bring out our inner beasts?

Yo! Sushi. This is a chain of conveyor-belt sushi shops. We saw a bunch of them while walking around and finally stopped at one to scratch Linn’s sushi itch. I, unfortunately, do not like sushi. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty and tidy and I’d love to love it- but I don’t.

Our hotel was in Earl’s Court and there was a bunch of restaurants (plus Earl’s Court Station) just around the corner. On our first night we were so hungry that we checked in, dropped off our stuff, and then picked the nearest open place we could find that looked good.

Zizzi was a great pizza and pasta place in Earl’s Court. They had a huge pizza oven you could see and a bunch of different choices. I went adventurous and took a white pesto sauce pizza with pine nuts, balsamic vinegar, spinach and sweet potato. I also tried a lemonade. It was tart. Very tart but very good.

Mooboo! We tried bubble tea for the first time. Tapioca bubbles in fruity tea. The staff was super helpful and explained our choices and the difference between the kinds of bubbles.

Linn liked it. I did not. Despite not liking it, I drank it all because, well, it had a straw and was cold and London has almost no trashcans.

On our second night we were in Soho looking for a place called PingPong but ended up finding Masala Zone instead. There were a few vegetarian choices. I really wanted to get the paneer but it had a three chili rating that I was told by the waiter was serious and could not be altered so I decided not to tempt fate and picked a one chili dish instead. I was right to be careful. The one chili rated dish was a good level of spicy and I did not need spicier, not even for cheese.

Linn got a mixed plate that looked really good. I was a bit jealous but mine was good too.

For dessert we had chai teas. I haven’t really been a fan of chai in the past but this was really great.

The next day we found PingPong in time for lunch! It was warm out and we were pretty excited to start off with iced teas.

The baby bok choy was AMAZING. Everything was really good and the menu is set up so that you can order small amounts of multiple things in order to try a lot of different dishes.

Mushroom stuffed bao and two different kinds of vegetarian dumplings! Of course they had lots of meat dishes too. I know Linn had as many dumplings/bao as I did but with meats. Clever, because then I couldn’t steal any of hers.

This was probably our favorite restaurant of the trip. The others were all really good, we didn’t have any bad experiences with our food adventures, but this was just extra amazing. There’s a pretty good chance we’d come back again next time we’re in London.

Last was Byron in Earl’s Court. We were wiped out and hungry after a full day running around London so we decided to go back to our hotel, drop off our stuff, and then try another place close by. This time we went for burgers.

I had a mushroom burger. The patty was a grilled portobello mushroom with goats cheese, roasted red pepper, spinach and aioli sauce. I also had mac&cheese and fries. Linn had a cheese burger and sweet potato fries.

All of our food experiences were really good. There was always vegetarian options (and not just one) and we never ran into anything we didn’t want to finish.

Beijing 8 is a chain of restaurants, super inexpensive but really good. I was really surprised how much I liked the tofu bao. I’m not usually a fan of tofu but it was great.

And the dumplings were good! I’d definitely go into a Beijing 8 again.

EAT was a real sit down, dinner time, restaurant. I’ll admit, I’m charmed by a places that gives me a cup of tea to start with while reading the menu.

Phong finally got his hands on noodles. They were in a curry sauce, a little spicy and really good.

I tried both of the vegetarian dumplings on the menu. The mushroom dumplings were AMAZING. The purple ones in the pictures are kimchi filled dumplings in a beet dough. I did not realize they were in a beet dough when I ordered them. The filling was good but I’m really not a fan of beets, it overpowered the whole thing which would have probably been great if I liked that flavor.

Holy Monkey! Located in the train station in Stockholm. We went here on our way in from the airport. We were so hungry! Cute little place and the food came out really quick. I was sitting next to Linn so I took a picture of her sushi too. The vegetarian dumplings were good and I really liked the plum sauce. I wasn’t a fan of the cold noodles underneath but both Phong and Linn liked them.

Turns out, smörgåstårtas are not so hard to make! I know, I know, from the pictures online you’d think it would be, but not so much. You don’t even have to bake anything!

We tried a few different things and it all turned out tasty and pretty easy.

That’s right, you just use loaf bread. You can use large unsliced loaves and cut them into thicker wedges if you want. You can also make them heart shaped or round and keep stacking them together long ways as well if you want a rectangle or a larger square cake. We did ours as “personal sized” so we could each try different things and decorate them. (Spoiler. Mine came out soooo much prettier.)

We cut the crust off because that was how all of the instructions I read did it, but I might not bother next time. It all gets coated in the end anyway.

We used a couple of fillings. One was egg salad. The other was cottage cheese with creme fraiche and apple shavings. It was pretty good. We did ours vegetarian but you can make the fillings however you like. Tuna salad. Chicken salad. Get experimental!

Ours were three breads high and then we coated the whole thing in a mixture of mayo, heavy cream (whipped together to be thick), chopped onions and chives. This is one of those things you make to taste. Mix and try and mix some more until you love it!

I put cucumber slices (sliced with a cheese slicer) on the sides of mine and then cheddar, tomato wedges and brie on top!

Phong’s was topped in ground up doritos, tomato wedges and brie.

Another smörgåstårta you could try out would be the mini.

Phong made this one for me as a birthday surprise. He toasted two pieces of bread and then used a cup to cut out circles. The creamy mix is the same as above that we coated the sandwich cakes in but this time he used it as filling too, and then covered it in ground up doritos (he knows me so well!). It was amazing!

Really amazing. We tore up the leftover bread into another bowl and then poured on the leftover sauce and dorito crumbs because we couldn’t get enough.

As you can see, once you break down how one of these is made, you can pretty much do anything with it. Now, if only it was healthy…